I thoroughly enjoyed my long memorial day weekend.  We decided to do something we've not done in a long while, and I've missed it a lot.  We visited a museum.  Which museum did we visited?  The Getty Villa in Malibu.  I've not been to this museum since I was in the sixth grade.  They've also done tons of renovation and it's just gorgeous. 

Although the Getty Villa is free, you do have to reserve tickets in advance.  There's also a parking fee of $8 per car.  The reservation keeps the attendance to a pleasant number.  We took a quick little garden tour with about ten other people.  The whole place was very pleasant. 

There is also a wonderful restaurant situated above the courtyard with a nice view of the Malibu Mountains in the back.  You order at the counter but they bring you the food.  We dined on the patio under a warm heat lamp.  The food was fantastic, extremely reasonable in price.  For $11, I got a gormet seafood soup with huge clams and tons of calamari, over a hunk of Focacia bread.  They also served wine and yummy desserts.  There were tons of tables, no lines and no fighting for tables.  The people there were drinking wine and enjoying their lunches at a slow pace. 

The Villa is different from The Getty Center in that it exclusively housed John Paul Getty's sculpture and artifact collections.  There are no paintings.  There is also a beautiful Roman Pool over looking the Pacific Ocean. 

My favorite part of the museum was the play pen for the children.  There is a "stage" with a light in the back projecting your shadow onto a white screen.  They had props so that you can pretend to be a Greek God or Goddess silhouett.  As you can see from the pictures below, we had more fun than the kids.

If you're in the LA area, we do recommend a visit.  The Villa is pretty small so you just have to spend half a day.  Then hop over to Santa Monica for some shopping at 3rd Street Promenade.

Mr. BAW killing a Greek soldier.

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Based on the topic of my last blog, you can probably guess what I've been busy doing lately.  I am happy to report that I have successfully printed all of my invitations at Kinkos without any problems!!  The folks at this 24-hour Kinkos I went to were great!  They were pretty young but that may be the reason that they were savy in working with my .jpg files.  They immediately understood how I wanted the invitations to be printed.  They knew the exact type of cardstock I brought in and how their printers were going to handle the thickness.  They printed out proofs of all the files I wanted in a matter of seconds.  The entire printing job took only one day, I picked it up the next evening.  They carefully packed the printed cards in a box separating each set of prints by a thick paper.  The best part of it all is that the total cost came out to be $230 (59 cents per side), for 75 x 3 sheets (3 cards per set) of invitations, rsvp cards, and maps.  The cardstock and envelop cost me $80.  So all in all, the cost of the invitations were ~$310.  The only thing I have to do now is to cut the invitations up since I printed two per sheet (150 sets).  I'm right on schedule to send them out in early June.

The other wedding-related tasks I've been busy with is finishing up our wedding website.  I have a few more pages to go when I realized that I've solely been designing my pages for Firefox!!!  I use Firefox almost exclusively at home.  But the stats I get from my web-counter indicates to me that the majority of the people still use Internet Explorer.  This caused some problems for me, especially in the font category.  I realized that the time I spent aligning my texts in specific positions to images is wasted when one views the same webpage in IE!  Luckily, Safari does well, the pages appear very similar to those view from Firefox.  Netscape also works well with my pages, unfortunately, (according to my stats above) no one uses Netscape anymore.  For now, I've done my best to get the most consistent look across all web browers but there are still some differences in the text sizes/alignment and font color.  So next time you view our wedding site, try using Firefox...it'll look much better!

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It's already the middle of May and I'm slowly getting back to wedding planning stuff.  Sigh...I am starting to look forward to the Honeymoon!  The first order of business is the invitations.  After pondering over letterpress for months, I've finally decided that it's not important enough to me to justify the high cost of letterpress.  Plus, I've always wanted to design my own invitations.  I want the invitations to reflect my culture and my style.  But I've also been afraid that I wouldn't do a good job of it.  So I needed inspiration...and I found it through Miss Flamingo of Wedding Bee Blog.  She designed her own invitations and they are gorgeous. 















And the nice part about her invitations?  She designed the back of them too!  So taking a cue from her...I also included designs on the backside of our invitations.  I will have one invitation card, one map card, and a RSVP postcard.  I decided to go with a postcard RSVP to save on postage and envelopes.

I won't reveal my design until they've all been sent out.  But I have gone out and purchased the cardstock and envelopes from Kelly Paper.  Luckily, there is a store near us and it was extremely convenient to just drive in and pick up the paper.  They have a HUGE selection of cardstock and I found the paper I wanted immediately.  The folks working there were also extremely helpful, offering several times to help me carry my paper and envelopes to my car. 

So how am I going to print my invitations??  I think I'm going to print one extremely good color version at Kinkos and then make color copies for the rest of them.  The color copies are .50 cents per copy.  Luckily I can fit two invitations per sheet since the invititations themselves will be 5"x7" and the map and postcard will be 4"x6".  But I will have to make copies of the back too.

I've never made invitations myself so I'm a little nervous about the whole process.  Hopefully it will go smoothly.  But I will let you know how it goes for other brides thinking of designing their own invitations.  I've enjoyed the design stage but are nervous about the printing stage....I hope to send out the invitations in June so I will have a few weeks to do all the printing. 

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Happy Mother's Day!!! Especially to my friend Lisa who just became a mom a few days ago to a beautiful baby girl.  Congratulations Lisa and John! 

Here are some flowers from our front yard, just in time for mother's day. I love full headed roses, so romantic.  I hope to expand the rose bushes we already have by splitting canes from the existing plants. 

Speaking of Mother's Day, each year at around Mother's Day a very special event also occurs at our household.  Yes, it's Toby's birthday!!!!  Hppy Sixth Birthday to my little baby!  And what is it that Toby wants more than anything in the world?? His daddy's yummy peanut butter carrot cake, of course!  This year the cake turned out perfect, so fluffy and warm.  Toby enjoyed it over two meals. 

I would also like to say Happy Mother's Day to all the moms with furry babies!  You work plenty hard for those "babies" too!

Toby's eagerly awaiting for his cake.

The yummy cake, in the shape of a bone.

Half of the cake, cut up and ready to be consumed.

Um...yum...

Happy Birthday to our doggie friends who also recently celebrated their birthdays!

This is Jack and he just turned 1!!!  Congratulations Jack, being one is huge in dogs.  You're now practically full grown weighing in at a full 8lbs!  His mom baked him this great looking cake complete with straberry topping. 

Tigger above is actually Jack's aunt.  She got a gormet cake her mom bought her.  It looks yummy enough for humans to eat! 

For the big guy Emil, I got him his very own puzzle.  He's 14 but looks fit enough to be a four-year-old!  Emil LOVES walks.  He lives for his daily walk to the neighborhood park and horse trail.  He can also say "I love you."  He's just a big lovable bear.  Whenever we visit Emil and his parents (Mr. BAW's aunt and uncle), Emil graciouly let Toby play in his huge backyard. 

Toby's buddies Duke and Eddie also had their 5th birthdays back in March.  Happy Birthday boys!  We can't wait for you guys to visit Toby's new home.

Duke and Eddie have a 6-month old human brother.  So Happy Mother's Day to my good friend Kim!!  Can't wait to see the big boy again.

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